Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Here's a few updates on the collapsing of the warmist mantra, which in a more rational world would presage the collapsing of the bipartite political stampede towards an Emissions Trading Scam.

First of all, and despite "predictions" by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that this century we'd start to see the planet burn, instead, so far, we've seen ... this:That is, no net global warming. Marlo Lewis explains the graph, courtesy of atmospheric scientist John Christy, here -- but note:

This graph, , shows how climate models and reality diverge. The red, purple, and orange lines are model forecasts of global temperatures under different emission scenarios. The yellow line shows how much warming we are supposedly “committed to” even if CO2 concentrations don’t change. The blue and green lines are actual temperatures as measured by ground-based (HadCrut) and satellite (UAH LT) monitoring systems.

What’s really rather remarkable, is that since 2000, the rates at which CO2 emissions and concentrations are increasing have accelerated... And yet, despite accelerating emission rates and concentrations, there's been no net warming in the 21st century.

I'll let you work out what that means for the veracity of the warmists' models, and of their predictions. If the planet's gonna burn, as all the warmists say it will, it sure as heck is goin' the wrong way about it.

Second of all, and despite further "predictions" by the United Nations IPCC that the likes of impoverished Bangladesh will lose 17 percent of its land by 2050 because of rising sea levels due to global warming, leaving 20 million Bangladeshis to become "environmental refugees" -- and NASA's scaremonger-in-chief James Hansen to "predict" that the entire country will be under water by the end of the century -- the Banagladeshi landmass just resolutely refuses to play ball.

After studying 32 years of satellite images, scientists from the Dhaka-based Center for Environment and Geographic Information Services say Bangladesh's landmass has been increasing by 20 square kilometres annually. That's an extra 2000 square kilometres or so of land on which "environmental refugees" can continue to make themselves at home. [Story here.]

Oops.

Warmists might point out that Bangladesh's annual increase in land is due to the enormous amounts of sediment travelling down the big Himalayan rivers and deposited at the Bangladeshi delta, and so is nothing to do with the "predicted" sea level rises the warmists are looking forward to -- and while IPCC-loving warmists are still looking forward to a predicted fifteen inches or so by 2100, uber-warmists like the Goracle and his followers are eager for the twenty-foot deluge that will soak most of the world's major cities unless (they say) we stop our carbon belching ways.

But despite the predictions, reality once again just refuses to comply with this disaster scenario either. As Bjorn Lomborg points out, "over the past two years, the global sea level hasn’t increased. It has slightly decreased . Since 1992, satellites orbiting the planet have measured the global sea level every 10 days with an amazing degree of accuracy – 3-4 millimeters (0.2 inches). For two years, sea levels have declined. Proclaiming six meters of sea-level rise ... requires the sea-level rise to accelerate roughly 40-fold from today."

But there's nothing at all to suggest it will. If the planet's gonna drown, as all the warmists say it must, it sure as heck is goin' the wrong way about it.

Meanwhile, up at the top of the world, if you're wondering why you haven't been hearing "The Arctic Ice is Disappearing" stories this northern summer, it's because the Arctic Ice isn't going anywhere -- except of course to melt slightly over the northern summer, just as it has every summer since time began. In fact, NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center data shows ice for this northern summer "nearly identical to 2002, 2005 and 2006... ice has grown in nearly every direction since last summer - with a large increase in the area north of Siberia. Also note that the area around the Northwest Passage (west of Greenland) has seen a significant increase in ice. Some of the islands in the Canadian Archipelago are surrounded by more ice than they were during the summer of 1980."

Yes, Virginia, the polar bears are safe.

Naturally, the onset of reailty leaves politicians all the more resolute in pushing ahead with their emissions trading scams -- hell, they think, there's control and tax revenue to be made out of this -- and it leaves warmists all the more shrill. Take the new Australian "warmer-drama" Scorched in which Sydney will be made to burn -- on celluloid, if not in reality. Or the recent report on "climate change" produced by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, which has been described as "a gross perversion of science based on faulty methodology and dodgy inferences... with a complete disregard to opposing views that are held and published by other credible, qualified and knowledgeable persons." Or the litany of Goremongering that the Occar-winning Man Who Would be President trots out whenever there's a microphone about. Or the banishing of dissent that a warmist mainstream media is increasingly adopting. Or the head of the UN's IPCC likening a critic of the IPCC to Hitler "because the man had publicly reflected on whether it would make more sense to compensate and relocate the residents of Pacific island nations threatened by rising sea levels (sic) instead of attempting to keep sea levels somewhat constant."

Director of The Great Global Warming Swindle film Martin Durkin knows all about the shrillness of warmists. One year since it aired on Britain's Channel 4, Durkin sums up the reaction: a chilling attack on free speech. "To greens," he says, "I was worse than a child abuser." But as the The Sydney Morning Herald observed in the wake of the Australian screening of the film, "There is something odd about the ferocious amount of energy expended suppressing any dissent from orthodoxy on climate change. If their case is so good, why try so fervently to extinguish other points of view?"

Perhaps because it's clear enough now even to the zealots that their case is unproved, it's uncertain and it's crumbling.

The politicians will never "wake u"p. The 'mainstream consensus' science is behind them, and so they will continue to be able to use it to push their statist fantasies of taxes and controls.

That is why we need to argue against their plans in ways that do not use scientific arguments, but merely point out the idiocy of applying such economically harsh solutions to such a mild long-term problem.

This isn't 100% correct, 600 are legally hunted each year in north Canada. I put hunting a polar bear on my bucket list a while ago so was thrilled when I found out I could do it legally with out having to yell "It's coming right for me" before pulling the trigger ;)

I was watching last season of Deadliest Catch and seem to remember seeing the crab boats in the Barings Sea frantically trying to get away from the ice sheet that had come down through the straights. I thought that it didn;t look particularly melted, especially as it was advancing many kilometres every day.

It's a frequent inactivist position to look at yearly or even monthly data trends and say it "debunks" the theory. But it's ignorant of "climate variability" vs "climate trends".

Look at that graph again. There is one year of downturn at the end. And it's still higher than the majority of the 1990's years. Looking at single year trends like this is simply moronic.

There's a similar story to be told for the sea level rises - why not look at some real data instead? You can see the 2-year trend, but of what significance is such a trend if it is within the natural variability.

One the Arctic Sea Ice extent - same thing yet again, 2008 has more ice than 2007 but that doesn't buck the long-term trend, and people are still expecting an ice-free arctic ocean by 2015.

If you watch The Great Global Warming Swindle be prepared for a whole lot of logical fallacies, inaccuracies and the odd outright lie. See this video for a decent rebuttal of it.

I still await an answer to how this problem would be addressed by the Libertarians. Right now, all I've seen is denial of the problem, which is a shame because denial is a position only supported by stacks of ignorance.

Governments of the world have paid dearly for scientists to prove the hypothesis that mankind is causing global warming.

Government is not about to admit it was a waste. That they refuse to allow alternative ideas and conflicting science from well qualified scientists attests to this as fact. Suppose these same governments paid a like sum to prove an alternative hypothesis. They would certainly get it. But alternative causes of climate change are not desired, despite the salvation an alternative would provide for our people and our economic systems.

SamV, there is no official Libertarianz position on global warming. The things you read here are PC's opinion. Various members of the Libz hold widely differing views over whether or not anthropogenic global warming is actually occurring.

Hoiwever, one thing we do agree on is the proper position of the government on global warming, which is essentially:

"The state shall make no law forcing citizens to prepare for any change in the climate, or preventing them doing the same."

SamV said...One the Arctic Sea Ice extent - same thing yet again, 2008 has more ice than 2007 but that doesn't buck the long-term trend, and people are still expecting an ice-free arctic ocean by 2015

So, what would be the proper window (time-sequence) to use? Is 150 years enough? How about 10 years? Perhaps we can stretch it back then to 20,000 years ago? Are you aware that one of the fundamentals in time-series analysis is that the window is arbitrary. This means that it is up to whoever is doing the analysis to select a window.

Longer window is useful if the underlying process that is being modeled is stable, however if it is not stable, then it is useless to rely on historical data. The remedy that is often used , is that modelers use data-weighting to increase the weights of those recently arrived data and decrease those of the recent past.

If one chooses to use temperature from the past 20,000 years, then the graph would show a rise and fall, rise and fall in a periodic manner. If one chooses to use the data from the last 150 years, then it shows an upward trend. If however one chooses to use the last 10 years or so, then he/she will see a plateau or a decrease in average global temperature.

SamV, there is no official Libertarianz position on global warming. The things you read here are PC's opinion.

All I want to know is how global, gradual problems such as this can be addressed under an objectivist, libertarian framework. I'm not particularly interested in the "party line" as such... just how global change can be possible without governance.

It's good to test ideals in that way - contriving scenarios, even if in this case it happens to be based in scientific evidence, and seeing how they play out. And if they clearly can't cater for this situation, they are not worth standing behind.

SamV, you could try my posts at Pacific Empire for an example of how I think a government could approach global warming in a way that is focused on getting out of the way rather than huge interventions.

Actually there is a warming trend, but it is not AGW. If you look at a chart of temperatures for the past 5 million years you can easily recognize that each max peak is just a bit higher than the one before it (positive slope) and the max lows are much warmer than the ones before them. It has nothing to do with either CO2 or AGW but it is happening (over a very long time period with much regular oscillation). In other words, natural and small worry.

Luke, thanks, good to see it. I'm still somewhat lost as to how letting producers charge more for greener energy would make much of a difference, though. Forgive me for being something of a social pessimist, but I think few people are likely to choose the path of lower emissions if it is more expensive. However, my personal opinion is that this is a case of a skewed market. If you then go back and correct the market by accounting for the externalities of carbon emissions (and of course, emissions trading schemes are a mechanism for this), then I would have thought it would allow the free market to deliver the solution again. In fact if you consider that there are valid ways to introduce new carbon emission credits into the system (eg, by dumping slaked lime into the oceans), then you get rid of that pesky implication that you might have to cap growth to achieve it.

falafulu, the window chosen should be long enough to exclude variability and include trends. These can be analysed statistically from the raw data and further validated by trends from modeling.

jimw, that post was near my own "tipping point" on this debate. I had been for some time observed that most of the anti-AGW arguments I had heard had solid counter-arguments, but kept persistently being skeptical until I picked away every argument I knew of.

anonymous, logical fallacy. presence of past natural warming does not imply current warming is not as a result of our emissions.

clunking fist, it's a good question and was certainly a big one in the 1970's. However it was long ago answered, see about here, you'll need to read a little bit down until the part "the natural end of the current interglacial is tens of thousands of years away."

As was stated long ago (and repeated on this blog a few times a while back), there is a hierarchy of proofs that MUST be supplied by the global climate disaster pushers PRIOR to any action being inflicted upon mankind or, indeed, any soverign individual. This has not been accomplished (not even by SamV) and it is looking increasingly like it never will be (likely that the global warming sky-is-falling industry is based on an arbitrary fabrication of falsehoods and outright fibs). Putting all the sky-is-falling pimping aside, the proper solution to the issue of damages is:

1/. Should it be proven that the actions of an individual or a group of individuals is causing damage to another individual or group of individuals, then it would be required that the offending group restore (compensate or make whole) the damaged party and desist from inflicting further damage.

2/. The burden of proof always falls upon those who assert the positive. In this instance it would be those who make claims of damage being done to them. The standard of proof required of them is very high. It is absolute direct evidence from reality that must be supplied.

3/. There is no burden to prove the negative. The defending party/ies is/are not required to prove innocence (although they may chose to so do, they may even choose to demonstrate that errors exist within the assertions being made against them).

Note: In the absence of absolute and soverign individual property rights there is no proper solution.

In the hierarchy of proofs required by the climate pimps there is one in particular that should be considered very, very carefully. It is the challenge to prove that the necessary solution to a stated problem (in this instance global warming) is a coercive, compulsory collectivisation of individuals. Make no mistake about it, coercive collectivisation is what the asserted problem of climate alteration is employed to justify. It fails to even come close.

Putting aside the endless arguments about what "science" is correct and what is wrong for a moment, it is important to understand that the climate argument at core is whether individuals are to be treated as soverign or whether they are to be shackled within a collective, ruled by others.

Anon at 8:01am has pointed out that /GULP/ the earth is spiriling into the sun. Not a small worry at all. What else could explain the increasing peaks?! We MUST act now to save future generations. My models esimate that in about another 6 million years the oceans will boil away and all life will die.

Now, as it happens, I own a small armaments factory and I have modelled that explosives set off in the South pacific will push us back into a higher orbit again.

I recommend conventional explosives (like those I make) rather than nuclear, even though nuclear would be more effective, but it's just so darn EVIL.

Tip Jar

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Comments on this post

Wake up warmists
Roffle. I want in eager anticipation for the reaction to your post, sir!
I wish Helen Clark and Kevin Rudd would read this post...
The politicians will never "wake u"p. The 'mainstream consensus' science is behind them, and so they will continue to be able to use it to push their statist fantasies of taxes and controls.

That is why we need to argue against their plans in ways that do not use scientific arguments, but merely point out the idiocy of applying such economically harsh solutions to such a mild long-term problem.
Good work as usual PC.

I look forward to the warmists' red faces in years to come.

Or will they just plough on regardless because "climate change" could mean anything?

gregster
"Yes, Virginia, the polar bears are safe."

This isn't 100% correct, 600 are legally hunted each year in north Canada. I put hunting a polar bear on my bucket list a while ago so was thrilled when I found out I could do it legally with out having to yell "It's coming right for me" before pulling the trigger ;)

more info athttp://www.polarbearhunting.net/
I was watching last season of Deadliest Catch and seem to remember seeing the crab boats in the Barings Sea frantically trying to get away from the ice sheet that had come down through the straights. I thought that it didn;t look particularly melted, especially as it was advancing many kilometres every day.

Brian Smaller
It's a frequent inactivist position to look at yearly or even monthly data trends and say it "debunks" the theory. But it's ignorant of "climate variability" vs "climate trends".

Look at that graph again. There is one year of downturn at the end. And it's still higher than the majority of the 1990's years. Looking at single year trends like this is simply moronic.

There's a similar story to be told for the sea level rises - why not look at some real data instead? You can see the 2-year trend, but of what significance is such a trend if it is within the natural variability.

One the Arctic Sea Ice extent - same thing yet again, 2008 has more ice than 2007 but that doesn't buck the long-term trend, and people are still expecting an ice-free arctic ocean by 2015.

If you watch The Great Global Warming Swindle be prepared for a whole lot of logical fallacies, inaccuracies and the odd outright lie. See this video for a decent rebuttal of it.

I still await an answer to how this problem would be addressed by the Libertarians. Right now, all I've seen is denial of the problem, which is a shame because denial is a position only supported by stacks of ignorance.
".. and people are still expecting an ice-free arctic ocean by 2015."

This would be the same Arctic ocean over which Brits Clarkson & May drove last year.

To which "people" do you refer, Sam, and by whom are they funded?
Governments of the world have paid dearly for scientists to prove the hypothesis that mankind is causing global warming.

Government is not about to admit it was a waste. That they refuse to allow alternative ideas and conflicting science from well qualified scientists attests to this as fact. Suppose these same governments paid a like sum to prove an alternative hypothesis. They would certainly get it. But alternative causes of climate change are not desired, despite the salvation an alternative would provide for our people and our economic systems.

Why is this?
SamV, there is no official Libertarianz position on global warming. The things you read here are PC's opinion. Various members of the Libz hold widely differing views over whether or not anthropogenic global warming is actually occurring.

Hoiwever, one thing we do agree on is the proper position of the government on global warming, which is essentially:

"The state shall make no law forcing citizens to prepare for any change in the climate, or preventing them doing the same."
SamV, aren't we within the normal variability of temp for earth coming out of an ice age?

So we would be fighting gaia/mother nature/god if we tried to prevent the temp rising. But we WOULD succeed in making the poor poorer, too.
SamV said...One the Arctic Sea Ice extent - same thing yet again, 2008 has more ice than 2007 but that doesn't buck the long-term trend, and people are still expecting an ice-free arctic ocean by 2015

So, what would be the proper window (time-sequence) to use? Is 150 years enough? How about 10 years? Perhaps we can stretch it back then to 20,000 years ago? Are you aware that one of the fundamentals in time-series analysis is that the window is arbitrary. This means that it is up to whoever is doing the analysis to select a window.

Longer window is useful if the underlying process that is being modeled is stable, however if it is not stable, then it is useless to rely on historical data. The remedy that is often used , is that modelers use data-weighting to increase the weights of those recently arrived data and decrease those of the recent past.

If one chooses to use temperature from the past 20,000 years, then the graph would show a rise and fall, rise and fall in a periodic manner. If one chooses to use the data from the last 150 years, then it shows an upward trend. If however one chooses to use the last 10 years or so, then he/she will see a plateau or a decrease in average global temperature.

So, what is the preferred window, and why?SamV, there is no official Libertarianz position on global warming. The things you read here are PC's opinion.

All I want to know is how global, gradual problems such as this can be addressed under an objectivist, libertarian framework. I'm not particularly interested in the "party line" as such... just how global change can be possible without governance.

It's good to test ideals in that way - contriving scenarios, even if in this case it happens to be based in scientific evidence, and seeing how they play out. And if they clearly can't cater for this situation, they are not worth standing behind.
SamV, I thought you're a skeptic from a blog post on your site:

Are you doing the devil's advocate here?
All I want to know is how global, gradual problems such as this can be addressed under an objectivist, libertarian framework.

Missing the point? Why would it be any GOVERNMENT'S job to override nature: they're busy enough overriding HUMAN NATURE.
SamV, you could try my posts at Pacific Empire for an example of how I think a government could approach global warming in a way that is focused on getting out of the way rather than huge interventions.
Actually there is a warming trend, but it is not AGW. If you look at a chart of temperatures for the past 5 million years you can easily recognize that each max peak is just a bit higher than the one before it (positive slope) and the max lows are much warmer than the ones before them. It has nothing to do with either CO2 or AGW but it is happening (over a very long time period with much regular oscillation). In other words, natural and small worry.
Luke, thanks, good to see it. I'm still somewhat lost as to how letting producers charge more for greener energy would make much of a difference, though. Forgive me for being something of a social pessimist, but I think few people are likely to choose the path of lower emissions if it is more expensive. However, my personal opinion is that this is a case of a skewed market. If you then go back and correct the market by accounting for the externalities of carbon emissions (and of course, emissions trading schemes are a mechanism for this), then I would have thought it would allow the free market to deliver the solution again. In fact if you consider that there are valid ways to introduce new carbon emission credits into the system (eg, by dumping slaked lime into the oceans), then you get rid of that pesky implication that you might have to cap growth to achieve it.

falafulu, the window chosen should be long enough to exclude variability and include trends. These can be analysed statistically from the raw data and further validated by trends from modeling.

jimw, that post was near my own "tipping point" on this debate. I had been for some time observed that most of the anti-AGW arguments I had heard had solid counter-arguments, but kept persistently being skeptical until I picked away every argument I knew of.

anonymous, logical fallacy. presence of past natural warming does not imply current warming is not as a result of our emissions.

clunking fist, it's a good question and was certainly a big one in the 1970's. However it was long ago answered, see about here, you'll need to read a little bit down until the part "the natural end of the current interglacial is tens of thousands of years away."
As was stated long ago (and repeated on this blog a few times a while back), there is a hierarchy of proofs that MUST be supplied by the global climate disaster pushers PRIOR to any action being inflicted upon mankind or, indeed, any soverign individual. This has not been accomplished (not even by SamV) and it is looking increasingly like it never will be (likely that the global warming sky-is-falling industry is based on an arbitrary fabrication of falsehoods and outright fibs). Putting all the sky-is-falling pimping aside, the proper solution to the issue of damages is:

1/. Should it be proven that the actions of an individual or a group of individuals is causing damage to another individual or group of individuals, then it would be required that the offending group restore (compensate or make whole) the damaged party and desist from inflicting further damage.

2/. The burden of proof always falls upon those who assert the positive. In this instance it would be those who make claims of damage being done to them. The standard of proof required of them is very high. It is absolute direct evidence from reality that must be supplied.

3/. There is no burden to prove the negative. The defending party/ies is/are not required to prove innocence (although they may chose to so do, they may even choose to demonstrate that errors exist within the assertions being made against them).

Note: In the absence of absolute and soverign individual property rights there is no proper solution.

In the hierarchy of proofs required by the climate pimps there is one in particular that should be considered very, very carefully. It is the challenge to prove that the necessary solution to a stated problem (in this instance global warming) is a coercive, compulsory collectivisation of individuals. Make no mistake about it, coercive collectivisation is what the asserted problem of climate alteration is employed to justify. It fails to even come close.

Putting aside the endless arguments about what "science" is correct and what is wrong for a moment, it is important to understand that the climate argument at core is whether individuals are to be treated as soverign or whether they are to be shackled within a collective, ruled by others.

LGM
Anon at 8:01am has pointed out that /GULP/ the earth is spiriling into the sun. Not a small worry at all. What else could explain the increasing peaks?! We MUST act now to save future generations. My models esimate that in about another 6 million years the oceans will boil away and all life will die.

Now, as it happens, I own a small armaments factory and I have modelled that explosives set off in the South pacific will push us back into a higher orbit again.

I recommend conventional explosives (like those I make) rather than nuclear, even though nuclear would be more effective, but it's just so darn EVIL.